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Replying to three such extraordinary reviews of my book is no easy task, and I want to acknowledge how grateful and moved I am by the reviewers' generous appreciation of what I have written. I am honored not only by their direct expressions of praise for Awakening the Dreamer but equally by their nuanced and detailed reading of it. I feel that the essence of my contribution has been fully comprehended, both from my own perspective and in the broader context of each reviewer's individual vantage point. Although each of the three reviews deserves an articlelength reply, this is not possible, so my response must be limited to addressing just a few of the points made by each reviewer. That there are many other salient points to which I am not responding does not imply that I feel their significance to be less.
Of Jessica Benjamin's review I can say only that my appreciation is profound and heartfelt. The aspect of human development that I believe best describes the main focus of our respective contributions—negotiation of selfhood and otherness—is nowhere better illustrated than in the review itself. In her introduction to the review, she honors me by writing that my contribution records “the long, strange trip undertaken by psychoanalysis in the last decades [and} the intense struggle to transform our field in a way that utilizes the authentic personal experience of the analyst…. [He] never lets us forget what a costly struggle it really entails.” I could just as easily have written the same about Jessica. For the largest part of our individual writing careers we went our separate ways, each passionately constructing a pathway that we hoped would advance the struggle to “transform